You may have noticed that things have been quiet here on my blog for a long time. The reason I have been blogging less is that for the last two years I have been writing a book.

Mormons write a lot of books. But my hope is that this book will be different than other Mormon books you might have read– both in style and substance.

The purpose of my book is to help members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints build faith in Jesus Christ, the Church He restored through Joseph Smith, and the living prophets and apostles he has authorized to lead and direct it today. And while there are many LDS books with the same purpose, I hope to introduce new concepts and ideas that are not found in any other of the popular or scholarly books on Mormonism.

The human mind is an amazing thing. Our ability to reason and analyze is powerful. But our intellectual capacities can also lead us into mental traps and logical loops that interfere with our belief in the gospel. My hope is that my book will introduce readers to new ideas and concepts that can help them cultivate a faithful mind and avoid mental traps that undermine their faith.

The book includes some ideas that I have written about here on my blog over the last decade. But when started adapting these ideas from my blog posts into book format, I discovered that there were a lot of underlying concepts that inform my blog posts but that I have never explained. And I felt that it would be important for the book to lay out these ideas with greater context and in more detail.

I have some friends who are amazing writers and who can spin out spools of insightful, coherent prose like spinning gold out of straw over night. But I am a slow writer. I puzzle and struggle over every sentence and paragraph. And it takes a lot of mental and emotional energy for me to express my ideas in writing.

So, I have dedicated whatever time and energy I have for writing to working on my book manuscript. That means that even when I would like to blog about current events, or my observations about various topics, I have chosen instead to work on my book.

So far, I have written 9 chapters with over 39,000 words– which, including footnotes, comes out to over 170 double-spaced 8.5 x 11 pages. The final manuscript will probably be at least twice that number. So I’m about half way done.

In the last 10 months I have been scheduling time daily to work on it, so even though it has taken me 2 years to get to where I am, I hope to finish the second half faster than that.

Once the manuscript is complete, I would like to get it published through a traditional publisher. But if that proves too difficult, I may consider self-publishing.

If you would like to be informed about the progress of this project, or if you are interested in possibly reading pre-publication excerpts, if you are involved in book publishing and may be interested in evaluating it for possible publication, or if you are simply interested in purchasing or reviewing the book when it is available, please subscribe to receive email notifications about progress and publication at this link:

Book Notifications Subscription Form

I will also try to post periodic updates here on the blog.

Thank you so much for your interest and support.

J. Max Wilson